


The Girl in the Glass

by RecessiveJean



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Magic Mirrors, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 20:09:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2241822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They find each other by accident. They stay friends on purpose.</p><p>For all that they have so little in common, somehow it's more than enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Girl in the Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [willneverbreakme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/willneverbreakme/gifts).



Ginny executed the spell wrong. At least she thought she must have, since it had worked all right when her father set it up and showed her how to use it. She’d asked him to enchant her mirror as a means of communicating with Charlie in Romania, and Arthur Weasley assured her it would be a simple spell. But when she used it without him for the first time, she missed her brother altogether and got a teen-aged girl instead.

The stranger was blonde, wearing out-of-fashion Muggle garments and a deeply irritated expression. Ginny was so taken aback that she could only sit and stare. The older girl, not nearly so at a loss for words, set down her hairbrush and addressed Ginny.

“Pardon me, but could you go away? I'd rather not have you in my looking glass.”

“Oh,” said Ginny, flushing a deep crimson. “Yes, sorry. Wrong mirror.” And she cancelled the spell before it occurred to her to ask the girl who she was.

After that, she got Charlie without a problem. They had a nice chat about his studies and dragons and what her plans were for school next year, and Ginny forgot about the blonde girl.

Until next time.

 

* * *

 

The second time it happened, Polly Plummer blamed herself. It was Digory who insisted on examining every inch of the mirror and trying to get the red-headed girl to return, but Polly still blamed herself because she’d told him about the incident in the first place, and she knew what Digory was like. He couldn’t leave things well enough alone.

“She just _appeared_ , you say?” Digory said, flipping the mirror frontwards and back, twirling it until Polly became convinced it would crack on the tabletop and put an end to the experiment for good. “No hocus pocus, or anything like that?”

“I should think a strange little girl in my glass was hocus pocus enough,” Polly muttered, but Digory did not seem to hear. He was flat on the floor, squinting under the bureau as if he expected to find the ginger girl taped to the underside of the drawer.

“You didn’t say anything, did you? Special words, or something?

“I said ‘ouch’ when I knocked my hand on the bureau.”

Digory immediately leaped to his feet, thumped the bureau enthusiastically, and cried “ouch!”

No red-headed girl appeared in the glass.

“Digs, really,” Polly frowned, “it’s not . . . I mean, must we? Again?”

He over at her with the sort of fond exasperation typical of people who have very little in common, yet in spite of themselves have become almost inseparable, often to the great frustration of both parties.                                                                  

“I suppose we don’t have to,” Digory sighed, reluctantly stepping back from the bureau. “But chasing a girl in a looking glass is a sight better than spending the week with Uncle Andrew.”

“Is he very bad, lately?” Polly asked. Digory nodded, raking a hand through his hair.

“I think he’s up to something. When I came to town I left him looking distinctly ferrety and smelling of gin. It’s never a good combination.”

Polly flinched in sympathy.

“I’m sorry. At least he has your parents to keep watch on him.”

“Ye-es . . . though I sometimes think Father doesn’t take it seriously enough, the damage he can do. Mother has a better understanding of the risks.”

“I suppose that stands to reason,” Polly pointed out, “since she grew up with him, after all. She must have some idea of the trouble that can result from an improperly supervised, ginny, weaselly Uncle Andrew.”

“Not weaselly,” Digory began, “I said ferret—“ but he broke off, startled, because at Polly’s words the glass rippled and misted, and the reflection of her bedroom gave way to the image of a different room altogether.

A little girl with red hair looked out at them in considerable surprise.

“. . . oh dear,” said Polly.

“Oh!” cried the girl. “You again!”

Then Digory climbed onto the bureau and put his nose to the glass, which made the red-haired girl draw back at once.

“Digory get down,” Polly ordered, “you’re fogging my mirror.”

Digory got down.

“Who _are_ you?” he wondered, and the little girl looked surprised; almost defensive.

“ _You_ called _me_ ,” she retorted, which was how Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke met Ginny Weasley.

 

* * *

 

Digory was disappointed to learn it was a spell that connected the mirrors. Polly privately thought that was foolish of him, since what else could it have been, but she only said he’d have to cope with the disappointment as best he could and accept that two-way mirrors were not going to become a fixture in British households any time soon.

Which was when Ginny told them that in wizard households, they were.

Naturally that opened up a whole other line of academic inquiry, to the point that Polly thought it was just as well Digory got no more than a day to quiz Ginny on the subject before a telegram came from Mrs Kirke. Uncle Andrew had gone off again, and Digory was needed at home straight away. This left Polly and Ginny to work things out in relative peace.

“Nineteen-ought-five?” Ginny echoed. “Truly? I didn’t even know that was possible, to make a call to the past. I wonder if Dad knew. He's put spells on a few things around the house that sometimes do more than they should. Why, even our car—” she stopped, then murmured, “but maybe I shouldn’t say.”

Polly nodded feelingly.

“Yes, maybe you hadn’t better. It’s the sort of thing that could easily go very wrong, isn’t it? Explaining something too early, or telling me what I shouldn’t know yet. We’d better not.”

 “Oh,” said Ginny. “You mean . . . at all?”

Polly hadn’t, but as soon as Ginny said it, she could see this was the responsible answer to make. If Ginny lived, as she said, over eighty years in the future, it was probably unwise to communicate with her. But somehow, Polly couldn’t bring herself to make the declaration.

Instead she said “I suppose . . . provided we agree to be _extremely_ careful about what we say . . . there’s no harm in a little conversation.”

She knew it was dangerous even as she said it. She also thought she saw the same knowledge reflected in Ginny’s own expression, which was embarrassing, that a little girl barely nine years old could know so much better than she. But the kind of adventure that could be got from sitting at one’s bureau and talking to a mirror was the only kind of adventure Polly Plummer was ever likely to enjoy, and now that the chance had presented itself, she wasn’t about to let it slip away.

 

* * *

 

As friendships and correspondence went, there was not much of a pattern to Polly and Ginny's. Mostly, when either girl wanted to see the other, she would sit at the mirror and say the other’s name. Ginny had explained early on that this was how you called each other through the mirror, which prompted Polly to ask if that was how Ginny had called her.

“Did you say my name, the first time?” she wondered, and Ginny, in some confusion, said no, of course not. She hadn't known it.

“I forget what happened,” she said stiffly, and would say no more. It was as well that Digory was not there for that conversation, because he would not have been half as willing as Polly was just to leave it at that.

Digory _was_ there a year later, visiting the Plummers over his Christmas holiday when Polly awoke with a terrible start. The mirror had gone all green and black, and foul hissing was leaking from it. Polly at once leaped from her bed and ran down the hall to the room Digory used when he stayed with her. She thumped on the door until he came to see what all the fuss was about.

When Digory saw the mirror he was alarmed as well and did not try to hide it.

“Look,” he said, “I know you’re fond of her, but this can’t be anything good, and it’s leaking all over your floor. Maybe we had better . . .” and he picked up a paperweight from Polly’s bedside table, meaning to smash the glass.

“No!” Polly cried. “No, you can’t—what if it means she needs our help?”

“ _Our_ help?” Digory said, incredulous. “A little wizard girl a century from now needs _our_ help? Good luck to her!”

But Polly, equal parts frightened and furious, marched up to the glass and shouted, “ _you there!”_

Was it her imagination, or did the hissing falter? Mustering every scrap of courage she ever had, Polly clenched her fists and continued.

“If you can hear me . . . listen. I don’t know what you are, if you’ve got her somehow, or if you’re using her, or her mirror, or you’re inside her head. But whatever you are, you had better know this. I’m from before her. I’ve got years and years and years left before she happens, and not much else to do with them but sit here and work out how to stop you before you ever start. So if you don’t want me to spend the rest of my life planning how to keep you from hurting her . . . well, just _stop_.”

It would never go down in the history of great speeches. It was not even one of Polly’s personal best, since she made it with her hair unbound and sleep-tousled, her nightdress and dressing gown very hastily bundled around her, and her voice quivering the whole time under the force of her fear. But whatever was doing the hissing, smoking and screaming seemed to hear her through those details, and was impressed by some truth in what she said. The mirror shuddered, flickered, and resolved into a dim reflection of Digory and Polly, alone in the room once more.

“Did it work?” Digory asked, dubious.

“I don’t know,” said Polly. “I hope so.”

 

* * *

 

Ginny answered Polly’s summons the next day. When Polly asked about the smoke and hissing, the little girl looked terribly embarrassed, and would only say that it was sorted now.

Polly let the matter rest, and insisted that Digory do so as well.

Letting things rest was never Digory’s strong suit. He might have kicked up a fuss, only he got appointed to an excavation in Egypt immediately after Christmas so he was away long enough that other affairs stole his focus. By the time he came back to England, Polly and Ginny had long since moved on to other matters.

 

* * *

 

Too often through the years it seemed there was no logical order to their communication. This was because each girl always answered when the other called, which meant the call couldn’t go through until the other was also at her mirror. The inconsistency between calls and answers created a nuisance of gaps and breaks, and the difference in years between them only seemed to add to the confusion, because time, they soon found, did not pass in anything like a parallel. Sometimes it would be a day since Ginny had last spoken to Polly, but Polly would say on her end it had been weeks. Other times it was months.

On occasion, it was years.

The first time years passed was one of the worst moments for both of them. Immediately following the brutal interruption of Bill and Fleur’s wedding, with Death Eaters rounding up the remaining guests to interrogate them, Ginny stumbled, panting, into her room. No sooner had she closed the door than the glass resolved into Polly’s face.

If Ginny had been in better possession of her wits, she'd have seen straight off that years had passed on Polly's end. No longer a teenaged girl, Polly was entirely grown up and deeply, quietly, afraid. But Ginny had just seen her brother's wedding reduced to shambles and screaming. She was not in a noticing mood.

“No,” she said, “no Polly, it—I can’t. Not now.”

“I must, though,” said Polly, and Ginny felt a moment’s wild fury, an inexplicable rage that condensed into a need to blame Polly for an ignorance that was in no way her fault.

“We’re at _war_ ,” cried Ginny.

She meant to add  _you wouldn’t understand_ but Polly’s reply knocked the wind from her lungs.

“So are we.”

They stared at each other across the expanse of time, and knew in that moment that they would neither of them ever be the same. When next they talked—if ever they talked again—it would be as very different people. The anticipation of that loss sat heavy on them both.

“Is it . . .” Ginny began, then stopped. They’d been so strict about the rules once they found out how many years ago Polly lived. Polly herself had insisted that there were things they must never discuss, because Polly was ruthlessly practical that way, and could not even allow herself the indulgence of a friendship without rules to govern its existence. But this time pragmatism had deserted her, because Polly only said,

“Nineteen-fifteen. It . . . look, Ginny, I know we said we wouldn't. But . . .”

So Ginny nodded.

“Yes. I know the one. It’s going to be all right in the end.” It was almost a lie, because of how much would also not be all right ever again. But she knew that in the very grandest scope, in the most technical sense of victors and victories, it _would_ be. And she knew, because this was Polly, that the grandest scope was what mattered most.

Sure enough, the tension eased from Polly’s face at once.

“Thank you,” she said. “I hope . . .” but she  could not complete the thought aloud.

Ginny nodded fiercely.

“Yes. You, too.”

Then her mother shouted for her to come, _now_ , as the last charm, the one on their front door, was shattered.

When she looked back to the mirror, Polly was gone.

 

* * *

 

It _was_ all right, in the end, but it cost them both more than they would ever say.

Polly asked her the same question one more time, when two years had passed on Ginny’s end and more than two decades had passed on Polly’s.

_Nineteen-forty. Look, Ginny, I hate to ask, but . . ._

Ginny gave her the same answer. She did not see Polly again until it was over.

 

* * *

 

“Oh!” Polly cried. “Oh, _congratulations_.”

Ginny smiled, absurdly pleased that her mirror-friend was so happy for her, even with all the stretches of time between. And the last couple stretches had been great, indeed.

Polly was no longer blonde. She was snowy-haired, her skin indelibly creased by the decades, and gently, genuinely delighted to know that Ginny Weasley was carrying her first child.

“You are well?” Polly asked. “Healthy?”

“Yes, oh, yes. Really, the only difficulty . . .” but here she faltered.

There was so much she’d tried not to share, about Harry and the ugly pressure of _destiny_ as it sat on him. She worried that anything about Harry would come under the embargo on _too much information_ that Polly had instated when Polly had still been a pragmatic old woman in a young girl’s body. But now, at seeing Ginny's hesitation, Polly only smiled.

“I am no longer in a position to effect much change. If there was ever a reason to be cautious, I think it has long since passed away. You have troubles. Won’t you let me hear them?”

So Ginny began to explain, carefully at first, then less carefully, what it meant to be the woman carrying the child of a man around whom had risen a kind of odd, cult-like following since his infancy. She told Polly that even though their wars were over— _please, please let our wars be over_ —there were still people who looked to her as the fulfillment of a fulfillment, as it were; who seemed to expect her child to be unreservedly marvellous, simply because its father had once had some words spoken about him and locked in glass.

Ginny found it too much to bear, the burden of saving the world and pretending that the carnage of deliverance was worth it, in the end.

Polly, who had walked two worlds and fought two wars, listened. She nodded from time to time, the light from her bedroom window casting her in a glow that would better befit some angelic oracle than an elderly woman who had just brought in the summer’s first carrots from her garden, and called up an old friend. When Ginny finished her explanation, Polly sighed.

“Destiny is such an ugly concept. It traps one. If Digory were here, or the younger ones, they could maybe explain it to you better. Most of them have been the subject of prophecy, or at least the cause of it, so they understand it more intimately than I. But please believe me, my friend, that even destiny cannot haunt you forever. In the end there is freedom to be had. I think you are strong enough to survive the search for it.”

Ginny, who felt nothing close to strong—only nauseated and suffering from heartburn—tried to hope that Polly might be right.

 

* * *

 

The next time her mirror yawned into the past, the face on the far side was new. Ginny was pacing the floor, a screaming baby on her hip, a curse on her lips, when the voice arrested her midstride.

“Excuse me, but . . . are you Ginny Weasley?”

Ginny paused midstride and stared at the mirror. The girl in the glass was young, raven haired and strikingly good looking, dressed in what must once have been the height of Muggle fashion.

She looked like she had been crying.

Ginny nodded cautiously. “Yes, I am . . . look, sorry, are you using _Polly’s_ mirror?”

It was the wrong thing to say. The girl's face crumpled and she stumbled backward, breaking the connection. The image clouded and disappeared from view.

 

* * *

 

The dark-haired girl was back two days later, her eyes no longer red-rimmed, her lips thinned into a determined line.

“Sorry,” she said, straight away. “Polly left a note with the bureau explaining how to call you, but I shouldn’t have tried to get in touch. I wasn’t ready.”

“Ready is overrated,” Ginny promised. “Were you ready the first time you used magic?”

The question was maybe more to the point than the girl had anticipated; she drew back so abruptly that Ginny feared the connection would break again.

She hadn’t meant to be so blunt, but given everything she had just learned about the fate of her friend and the people Polly loved, Ginny was too full of her own loss to be overly considerate of this girl’s. Ginny had used the past two days to investigate, calling on Hermione for help with accessing Muggle death records. Hermione had helped her search, and they had found the correct name and date with only a little difficulty.

Armed with the date, they had found the articles about the accident and the names of those involved. Which meant . . .

“You _are_ Susan, aren’t you? Yours is the only name she used very often that wasn't listed. I didn’t mean to upset you, but Polly talked about you so much I feel I know you a little already. She said you were like her, though she would never say exactly how. I guessed it was to do with . . . that place.”

She moved toward the mirror, bouncing the baby, speaking earnestly.

“I’ve known her almost all her life. We . . . talked. I suppose it should have been strange, since we weren't very alike, but she was my friend.”

Susan smiled in a strange, helpless way.

“Yes, well, she and the Professor were never very alike either. But sometimes you only need one thing in common to help you stick together. I suppose theirs was . . .” she stopped. Choked.

An answering lump tightened Ginny’s throat.

“Yes. About . . . the other place. I don’t know anything specific, but I know there was _something._  Sometimes she would let things slip, I think because she knew I’d believe her. She knew I wouldn't laugh.”

Susan wavered. Ginny saw it all swell up within her, that moment of indecision where hope and disillusionment battled each other. This time Ginny had no foreknowledge to offer ( _you’ll win this war_ ) no assurance borne of special ability ( _name or describe the person you want to appear; it's really that simple_ ) and not even the foundation of a lengthy friendship, peculiar though it was, to buoy the girl on the other side of the glass.

This time she had only one thing to offer, and she desperately hoped it would be enough.

“If you want to talk . . . I can listen.”

"Yes," Susan whispered. "Oh—please—yes."

 

* * *

 

_When Ginny Weasley was nine years old, her father enchanted her mirror._

_“Now you can call Charlie any time you like,” he said. “Actually, you can call anyone. Any time you need somebody to talk to, eh? You just tell the mirror, and it will put you through.”_

_So Ginny sat at her mirror and thought of how alone she was. All her brothers had gone off to school and life, her father had gone to work and her mother was cleaning angrily downstairs, upset by absence of her family._

_At that moment, it was difficult not to feel more alone than Ginny had ever felt in her whole crowded, noisy, magic life, which was why, instead of saying her brother’s name, she told the mirror the truth._

_“I need somebody to talk to,” she said gravely. Then, because that sounded selfish, she clarified. “I mean, I need somebody who needs me, too.”_

_The mirror rippled, and fogged, and cleared . . ._

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this! I've a special fondness for both Polly and Ginny, so when I saw you'd requested both fandoms I thought I'd take the risk. I really hope you enjoyed it.


End file.
